Just A Deathly Silence In The Sky

Payne Stewart's Fatal Flight Caught His Friends Unprepared To Deal With Such A Horrendous Loss.

The plane rotated upward and streaked into the azure-blue Florida sky at 9:19 a.m. Within minutes air-traffic controllers in Jacksonville were monitoring the flight.

Because the crew had filed an instrument flight plan, controllers would be following their movements from Orlando all the way to Love Field in Dallas. They were headed northwest toward a VOR--a stationary navigational device that sends out an electronic Morse code signal--in north Florida. From there they would turn almost due west for the long leg to Dallas.

As the flight approached Gainesville, an air-traffic controller's voice came over the Learjet's radio:

Instead of turning at the VOR, the plane kept climbing and holding that northwesterly course.

Over the next three hours of Oct. 25, 1999, it became apparent the plane, for whatever reason, had lost cabin pressure, and the pilots, for whatever reason, were unable to correct that rapidly fatal circumstance. Payne Stewart and the five others onboard quickly succumbed to hypoxia, or oxygen starvation.

An alarm sounded when the air-pressure level inside the cabin plunged. Stewart and the others (quickly had) their eyes watering and popping out of their sockets. Dust swirled about the little cabin, and the temperature plunged quickly to well below freezing. Within a matter of seconds, water vapor inside the cabin condensed as fog, and the windows began frosting over.

The passengers began experiencing hot and cold flashes and the feeling of ants crawling across their skin. Stewart, no doubt, curiously noticed the skin beneath his fingernails turning blue and his senses of touch and pain diminishing as dizziness, blurred vision and slurred speech gave way to a moment of euphoria before he lost consciousness. In short order his oxygen-deprived heart shut down in a fatal coronary.

Within a matter of minutes, the reigning U.S. Open champion, his two agents, a golf architect and the two pilots essentially died in their sleep. Aviation officials refer to humans aloft as "souls." The irony is that probably before N47BA had even crossed into the southwest corner of Georgia, the six "souls" had departed the craft, leaving six frozen cadavers to endure a bizarre trek over America's heartland on a three-hour ride to oblivion in a field in South Dakota.

At 10:08, EST, at the FAA's request, two F-16 Air Force fighter jets scrambled from Tyndall Air Force Base to overtake and visually inspect the unresponsive Learjet. Ten minutes later, the Tyndall jets deferred to an Eglin Air Force Base jet that was aloft on a routine training maneuver over the Florida Panhandle. Capt. Chris Hamilton, 32, topped off his tanks from an airborne fuel tanker, then sped north at 600 m.p.h. for 50 minutes, finally overtaking the craft as it approached Memphis.

"When I closed in, I expected to just look in the cockpit and make eye contact with the pilot and get a thumbs-up that everything was OK," Hamilton would recount months later. "I was figuring it was just a radio malfunction or something. I never expected to see anything as catastrophic as what I saw."

Flying alongside about 50 feet off the Learjet's left wing, Hamilton could see the cockpit windows were frosted over completely, a certain sign of cabin depressurization. Authorities said the plane continued cruising along the fixed-course setting and was gradually "porpoising"--dipping to 38,000 and peaking as high as 51,000 feet. There was no movement apparent inside the craft.

"It's a very helpless feeling to pull up alongside another aircraft," Hamilton said after returning to base, "and realize the people inside that aircraft potentially are unconscious or in some other way incapacitated. And there's nothing I can do, even though I'm just 50 feet away, to help them at all."

Hamilton gave way to two more F-16s dispatched from the Oklahoma Air National Guard in Tulsa, which would later be relieved by four F-16s scrambled out of the Dakotas. They would escort the mute Learjet on the final segment of its doomed flight.

Larry Rinker, a journeyman pro who had enjoyed an off-and-on friendship with Stewart since they'd first earned their Tour cards at the 1981 spring qualifying school, strolled into a Hallmark store not far from his home in Winter Park, Fla., a tiny suburb of Orlando, at lunchtime that Monday. He was reaching for a card when his cell phone rang. It was his wife, Jan.